Norman Williams, 80, an Expert On Planning and Zoning, Dies

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Published: March 28, 1996

Norman Williams, a retired urban planner and zoning expert who was chief of New York City's Master Planning Department in the 1950's, died on Sunday at his home in Woodstock, Vt. He was 80.

The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his family said.

Mr. Williams, a lawyer, wrote extensively on land use and planning and the laws involved. After leaving city service in 1960, he directed a project to build a new city in Venezuela, then taught law and planning at Rutgers University and a number of other schools from Arizona to Vermont. He retired in December from the Vermont Law School.

A native of Chicago, he graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal.

Just out of school, he became president of the private Citizens Housing and Planning Council in New York. At the same time, he was associated with a consulting firm that was advising the City Planning Commission on a rezoning plan. Mr. Williams took charge of its legal aspects and joined the Planning Commission in 1950.

Over the next 10 years, he served as director of the commission's Division of Planning and then chief of the Office of Master Planning, overseeing long-range planning for the city.

Appointed a professor of urban planning at Rutgers, he undertook a 10-year analysis of some 10,000 court cases dating back to 1899. The resulting 3,400-page, five-volume study found that courts in the 1960's, during the peak of civil-rights activism, were increasingly involved in zoning suits. Local boards, the study concluded, were manipulating zoning rules to prevent the construction of affordable housing and keep low- and moderate-income people out of their communities.

Mr. Williams also wrote the eight-volume treatise "American Land Planning and the Law" (Callaghan; 2d ed., 1988) as well as many articles and other books on land use, historic preservation and environmental law. Among his honors was the Distinguished Leadership Award of the American Planning Association in 1991.

He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Jeanne Tedesche Williams; two sons, Norman, of Stowe, Vt., and Roger S., of Hamilton Square, N.H.; two daughters, Joan Chalmers Williams of Washington, and Sarah Williams Ksiazek; eight grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.